The Black Coalition for Rights in Brazil: An Intersectional Alliance

This project assumes that intersectional collaborations capable of articulating struggles for justice are both a necessity and a challenge for contemporary politics. To discuss thiThe presented project assumes that intersectional collaborations capable of articulating struggles for justice are both a necessity and a challenge for contemporary politics. To discuss this more general question, the project studies a concrete case: the Black Coalition for Rights created in 2019 in Brazil to fight against racism, sexism, as well as for democracy and social justice.

The research is led by Sérgio Costa from the Latin American Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin in partnership with Flávia Rios (Professor at the university of São Paulo) and Fernando Baldraia (a researcher from the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning, CEBRAP). In addition, the project team has a PHD researcher, Dandara Vicente, who pursues her dissertation project within the framework of the antiracist movement in Brazil. The projects are co-supervised by Sérgio Costa and Flávia Rios, as well as it also counts with the help of three student assistants, Nara Leoni, in Berlin, and Geovanna Patricio and Kathleen Santos in São Paulo.

As Pl’s, Sérgio and Flávia analyse how the Coalition is able to combine aesthetics and politics in its struggles for justice, besides also successfully managing political (in)commensurabilities. Equally interesting to them is the capacity of the Coalition to integrate within its struggles diverse fields of political action – from grassroots collectives to the parliamentary field, from the national state to the international arena. In order to contribute to the field of antiracism research and collective action, this research project aims to tackle on the nuances and specificities of the Black Coalition for Rights that may or may not lead it to be an example for other social movements on ways to organize themselves.

The project currently finds itself in its early stages with work being divided between the different participants. Flávia and Geovanna in Brazil are working in establishing a data bank through collecting important documents, whereas Fernando and Kathleen are in contact with different community libraries which will be further used as interview materials. Dandara is working on her research question for her doctoral thesis and Nara finished a data bank of the 240 organizations that compose the Black Coalition for Rights and now is working on a literature review.

In September the project is conducting a workshop in Brazil, at the University of São Paulo to present the results already gathered and to have people outside the project comment and provide insights on the developments of the research. Besides that, in the following years, 2027 and 2028, the other researchers Fernando Baldraia and Flávia Rios respectively are scheduled to come to Berlin to exchange the knowledge obtained at that point in the research and thus work closely together on the matter.